As a chess-like problem, it has way too many things wrong with it. But as a story, it is nebulously sparse in plot and characters. The problem of 'First Contact' is whether a way can be found to break the deadly-embrace of the zero-sum trap in which the two starships face each other. Or -?Ī knotty situation, based on the underlying reality of cultures encountering others throughout our history. It is a mutual problem with checkmate in two moves. Should they fight, perhaps to mutual destruction? Or flee, risking that the other ship will follow them home, learning their location without giving away their own? But the aliens are thinking along the same lines. In this story, the situation is symmetric: a Terrestrial starship on a scientific exploration to the Crab Nebula meets an alien starship on a similar mission, with an equivalent level of technology. Many consider 'First Contact' to be the story that defined 'first contact' as a problem in the sense of a chess problem with a mostly-empty board and just a few pieces in tense juxtaposition. First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster includes two dozen stories from 1934-1964: half from Astounding Science Fiction, two previously unpublished, two from the slick magazines, and the rest from other science fiction magazines.įirst Contacts takes its title from Leinster's famous 1945 novelet 'First Contact', on the initial encounter between humans and an alien race, and more or less gathers stories on this theme.

Leinster wrote many stories for the slick-paper magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, generally under his real name, Will F. I'm not sure there can be any such thing as the essential Murray Leinster - the man wrote far too much science fiction for that, entertaining readers across half a century of writing beginning in 1919, and occasionally sparking ideas that broadened into new realms of speculation, widening the way we think about time or interstellar travel. First Contacts - Essential Murray Leinster

Sam, This is You by Murray Leinster